Internal vs Rear Exhaust GPU Coolers
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
1,394 words · ~6 min read
0:00
gaming gear no not Game Gear gaming gear
0:03
like the stuff you need for gaming can be confusing to buy with all the
0:07
marketing fluff that gets thrown at Gamers in fact soon we'll be helping
0:11
Gamers narrow down their chair choices but today something a little bit more
0:16
traditional lineus Tech Tipsy gaming graphics card
0:26
shopping ensure Swift Victory with Corsair's highly respons lightweight
0:30
gaming mouse the saber RGB click now to learn
0:34
more now often the most obvious difference between one video card and
0:38
another is the cooler and this can have a tangible impact on the noise from your
0:43
PC the lifespan of your card and even
0:46
the performance of your gaming rig thanks to the way that modern graphics
0:50
cards turbo up their speeds when they're running nice and cool and throttle them
0:54
back down when they're overheating now there are marketing names for the
0:58
coolers used by the various card makers windforce Vapor X direct CU etc etc and
1:05
some of them are bound to be a little bit better or worse than others but today's video is going to tackle this
1:10
from a broader perspective how does the OEM style rear exhaust blower design
1:17
that you'll find on a reference video card one with a cooler design by AMD or
1:21
NVIDIA and then simply produced and rebranded by the manufacturer compare to
1:26
the open air designs that are typical of
1:29
a a nonreference video card where they blow the air kind of around in the case
1:34
versus blowing it out the rear panel so
1:37
let's walk you guys through the test we'll be using we wanted to examine this
1:41
from the perspective not necessarily of the most extreme PC Enthusiast but
1:46
rather a more typical PC Gamer so instead of using a Corsair 900d case we
1:52
went with a bit Phoenix Shadow a midtower chassis with decent but
1:56
decidedly unexceptional cooling with 12
1:59
20 mm fans at the front and at the rear on the inside we didn't do any special
2:04
cable management we installed a quad core core i7 non overclocked on a
2:09
passively cooled ASUS motherboard and we installed our power supply fans side
2:14
down so it would intake its own fresh air and exhaust it directly out the back
2:19
without affecting the other components in our test for our cards we chose a
2:23
GeForce GTX 780ti wind force from Gigabyte and a reference GTX 780 Ti that
2:29
we got directly from NVIDIA we chose these cards because as a high-end card
2:34
the 780ti generates a fair bit of Heat giving us a worst case scenario where
2:39
the difference in the results will actually be measurable and because our
2:42
780ti windforce uses the same PCB design
2:46
as our reference card eliminating board efficiency as a variable we also
2:51
overclocked our reference card to put it roughly in line with the rated clock
2:54
speeds of the wind Force card now we tested each configuration at idle and
2:59
and under load with Crisis 3 no unrealistic synthetic benchmarks here
3:04
and took temperature readings with our kype probe at the front intake rear
3:08
exhaust and inside the case near the stock CPU Cooler then we also took CPU
3:14
GPU motherboard and motherboard vrm
3:17
temperatures with aa's AI Suite monitoring software and MSI afterburner
3:22
now normally when we Benchmark graphics cards we do it on an open air test bench
3:26
for the ease of swapping them in and out but it appears that we may need to
3:29
re-evaluate this practice at some point in the future because while we did still
3:34
observe lower temperatures and therefore marginally higher boost clocks on our
3:38
open air graphics card just like we do on an Open Bench the internal
3:43
temperature of our case and therefore the temperature of every other component
3:48
inside went up significantly we're talking an increase in the neighborhood
3:52
of about 5 deg and on top of all this
3:56
the noise advantage that we normally observe with open air cool
4:00
was nowhere to be found our windforce
4:03
card was actually noticeably louder well the entire system was noticeably louder
4:07
with our windforce card than with our reference card so there you go
4:12
non-reference coolers might let your GPU run a little bit cooler but the rest of
4:17
your system will run hotter and possibly even louder unless you take the
4:21
appropriate precautions because remember this test scenario was designed to show
4:27
maybe not quite the worst but a very bad bad case scenario a mid-range GPU with a
4:33
lower TDP will not affect your case temperatures to nearly the same degree
4:38
degree like degrees of temperature sorry and adding more cooling fans or using a
4:43
better ventilated case like a fractal Arc series Corsair graphite series or
4:47
Cooler Master half series would help as well so the real Point here is make sure
4:52
that you use open air coolers responsibly and work to keep the rest of
4:56
your case temperatures down let us in
4:59
the comments if you thought this was interesting and if you'd like to see us tackle this topic again with maybe a a
5:05
different overall system configuration
5:08
and speaking of overall different system configurations how about ones that are
5:13
super hyper compact for free yes okay
5:17
not everyone gets one for free but this is the Intel kncd
5:20
54250 wyk wow that is a bit of a tongue
5:24
twister and if you're not familiar with the KN these things are freaking cool
5:29
they're little tiny PCS like so small you can fit them in your hand but
5:33
they're actually fully featured PCS so you can install sodum memory in them
5:37
they've got Intel onboard Graphics they've got Intel CPUs they've got
5:42
support for USB 3 they've got support for HDMI and DisplayPort out this
5:46
particular one has mini DP and mini HDMI
5:49
out for up to dual displays and supports gigabit Lan and finally also has you
5:54
know your built-in sort of sound and all that stuff so basically they're useful
5:58
for a ton of different things if you just just need a little tiny PC for
6:01
basic light use it'll do for that if you need a media center PC this kind of
6:05
thing makes a ton of sense compared to building up a full-size Tower next to
6:10
your TV when you can just hide it in the back or hide it in a corner or really
6:13
hide it wherever you want because the thing is actually passively cooled and
6:17
will be completely silent wherever you run it to the other thing that they can
6:21
be really great for is has a stream PC okay yes this is very similar to Media
6:25
PC cuz it would also be hooked up on your TV but because of the Intel onboard
6:29
graphics builtin h264 decoder if you
6:32
have a gaming PC somewhere else in your house you'll be able to decode using
6:35
steam and home streaming and run your games with actually very little latency
6:39
completely separately without building up a separate gaming machine so they're super cool they're actually surprisingly
6:44
affordable and we are giving one away for free don't you guys love it when we
6:48
do giveaways so check out the link in the video description for a chance to
6:52
win a d54 250 w y k h man I wish they
6:58
just called it like the bear CL or something like that but then that might
7:02
make me hungry Anyway full description details in the description click there
7:07
for a chance to win thanks for watching guys like this video if you liked it
7:10
dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment if your feelings are more complicated than this as always check
7:15
out the link other Link in the description to support us you can buy a cool t-shirt like this one give us a
7:18
monthly contribution to help us keep making videos like this and change your
7:23
Amazon bookmark one with our affiliate codes so whenever you're buying graphics
7:26
cards cases nucks whatever the case may be h case again we get a small kick back
7:32
thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe